This is a for fun team league for players in the D ranks. The aim is to provide a team for new/lower level players to practice with. Hopefully, this will achieve two things: Interest more people in Brood War, and help you get better at it. While having fun!

When?The league starts on August 17 2013 @ 17:00 GMT (+00:00) and takes place every Saturday following that. It will have a regular season of 10 weeks with the top 4 teams advancing to the playoffs.

Where?The tournament will be held in channel op DRTL on the iCCup server.

How to watch:L_Master will be casting sometimes, other casters that are interested please indicate your interest and I can add you to the listhttp://www.twitch.tv/l_master

Format:Teams will play one bo5 with an ace match. Team captains will have until the Thursday before the match to form their lineups and relay them to an admin. The selected players will play a bo1 to decide the outcome for that map. First to team to win three maps wins the match.

Rules:If you have an issue during match time please contact sGs.LMaster on iCCup to resolve it.

No excessive BMing. Manner CCs, Hatcheries and Nexii, as well as pylon hearts, nukes and infested terrans however, are encouraged.

Winning team sends replays to drits5@yahoo.com following the matches. All 5 replays must be put into one zip/compressed file for download

Winning team's captain must PM me the result of their match.

Standard ICCUP rules apply.

No excessive chatting, e.g. do not be distracting during the middle of the game.

If players are race pickers they must announce their races within 12 hours of the lineups getting posted.

Players need to identify which team they are playing with in their profile during match time.

Players must play using the ID they used to sign up.

Games must be played on the maps listed in the schedule.

Games may be postponed between players IF the postponement is scheduled at least 12 hours ahead of the match time and both captain were notified.

Maps must come from the latest ICCUP mappack.

If a player disconnects in the first three minutes then a regame will be granted. If the same player disconnects again they will be d/q. Any disconnect after three minutes will be reviewed by sGs.LMaster unless one of the players willingly forfeits.

Race picking will be allowed, but if you pick to play a certain race on a given day, you must continue playing that race throughout the whole day. You will only be allowed to change your race for the next week. For the purposes of this league, random will not be allowed.

Who can play:This league is only for D-/D/D+ rank players who are willing to participate consistently. This means MAX RANK. On ANY account. You cannot signup with a D account if you have been yellow or higher on another.

You may ask to to play if you don't fit the criteria and we will review the case. IF you attempt to sign-up without notifying me of having achieved a higher rank on the listed account of any other account YOU WILL NOT PLAY. There are no exceptions to this. Don't fuck up here or you will just get banned

The exception is players who played in DRTL S4. All players from those are exempt for having to inform me of their situation as I already am aware.

How to Sign up:Since this is the fourth season, previous season teams will be allowed to re-enter the competition. If you didn't participate in the previous seasons, but want to form a team with your friends and enter it, it will also be allowed. If you want to sign up as a team, PM me on the forums.

If you want to sign up as a free agent reply to this thread with the following info:Rank:ICCUP account:Race:

If you are a higher rank player, but think you'll have the time to help out, you can sign up as a coach.

Do you want to cast?If you want to cast the league, PM me or skype me (luciditymasters)

I will note that I am seriously considering a much stricter rule on those of us, including myself, that can probably hit C-. We have seen a dramatic drop off in true D's or D- players in this league...and I think that is in part because it has become more of a D+/C- league.

I have not made a decision yet, but there may be limited or zero eligibility for players that have hit C-/shown results consistent with being able to hit C-.

On July 24 2013 09:46 tonight wrote:Most of this league can probably hit C- so if you're going to be more strict you'll probably have to reassemble most of the teams since most of the members won't be able to participate.

Maybe limit the amount of players who can hit c- on lineups?

"Nana is a goddess. Or at very least, Nana is my goddess." - KazeHydra

On July 24 2013 09:46 tonight wrote:Most of this league can probably hit C- so if you're going to be more strict you'll probably have to reassemble most of the teams since most of the members won't be able to participate.

Maybe limit the amount of players who can hit c- on lineups?

Yea, either that or number of games that can be played by "C-" guys. Right now I'm just leaving discussion open while taking signups to see people's thoughts.

A nice thing i saw going on in the C ranks teamleague, and works well As far as i know, is to have 2 notable D+/C- players for each team. That raises the overall standard while keeping the base D.

I have another idea, tell me what you people think about it.

To implement, based on Birdie' s ranking system, that players who want to play in the week, play each other based on their ranking. The objective is to match people with actual same skill level. In other words, if a player is ranked #3 from on team, he will play the top #rank from the other team, and so on until the end.

As for maps, they could be organized the first week by having every top/ second/third/fourth/fifth/sixt rank maps decided, and then going down in a loop

Example #1 week Fs top, #2 week FS second, etc.

This idea is based around the swiss system of matching people to play

The downside is this would kinda break the sporting "lineups and i don' t know who i will be facing until LU are out" . With this system you are much more likely to know who is playing.

The upside is it would allow people to play more against a similar rank to theirs. Obviously Birdie would have to make an August D ranking system, like the one he did past september. I was studying that one and i could see similar players in similar spots.

On July 24 2013 06:00 L_Master wrote:I will note that I am seriously considering a much stricter rule on those of us, including myself, that can probably hit C-. We have seen a dramatic drop off in true D's or D- players in this league...and I think that is in part because it has become more of a D+/C- league.

I have not made a decision yet, but there may be limited or zero eligibility for players that have hit C-/shown results consistent with being able to hit C-.

It's true that the overall skill has risen, but it's hard to tell if someone have actually passed the strong D+ mark yet. I believe that if you can climb to C- fairly steadily, and reach C in a reasonable amount of games, you shouldn't be playing here. I don't know anyone who actually would fall in this category though, by recent results atleast. I think it's pretty obvious who the strongest players in the league are, but these players are so close in skill that it's hard to say that some of them are too good, if you at the same time say that some of them are ok. That's the big issue here. If you mention player A, you might as well mention player B, and then player C, and then you end up with a list of 20 players, where there's a distinct difference in skill between the top and bottom player, but no distinct border inbetween. I think max rank C- is a good border, ie if you hit C you're out, but some ppl might want to put the border lower than that. There's also the issue of most players not laddering enough to gauge their max rank.

This page gives a better estimation of the rank, as it also considers prior seasons on iccup, and I believe it also estimates the rank of your opponent. It's only been around for the past 2-3 seasons so it's definately lacking info for many players.

It's nice to see that Rauk (who have left the league) is the only player on the wrong side of L3gendary. There's a lack of games for most of the players up there though, so a few of the players might pass him if you add 50 games to their list.

I think it would be interesting to gauge the size of the group of D rank players who have previously chosen not to participate because of the skill levels. I know that there are players like that, because I've seen this being brought up before. I just don't know how many they are. If there's plenty of them, I think having a stricter rank policy would be justified.

On July 24 2013 06:00 L_Master wrote:We have seen a dramatic drop off in true D's or D- players in this league...and I think that is in part because it has become more of a D+/C- league.

This is a key problem. If we remove all the players who can hit C- (probably many of the more committed and reliable players), we are left with an extremely low population unless we get a strong influx of D players. I foresee recruiting enough players to sustain a league again is going to be the hard part.

On July 24 2013 18:51 pebble444 wrote:A nice thing i saw going on in the C ranks teamleague, and works well As far as i know, is to have 2 notable D+/C- players for each team. That raises the overall standard while keeping the base D.

I have another idea, tell me what you people think about it.

To implement, based on Birdie' s ranking system, that players who want to play in the week, play each other based on their ranking. The objective is to match people with actual same skill level. In other words, if a player is ranked #3 from on team, he will play the top #rank from the other team, and so on until the end.

As for maps, they could be organized the first week by having every top/ second/third/fourth/fifth/sixt rank maps decided, and then going down in a loop

Example #1 week Fs top, #2 week FS second, etc.

This idea is based around the swiss system of matching people to play

The downside is this would kinda break the sporting "lineups and i don' t know who i will be facing until LU are out" . With this system you are much more likely to know who is playing.

The upside is it would allow people to play more against a similar rank to theirs. Obviously Birdie would have to make an August D ranking system, like the one he did past september. I was studying that one and i could see similar players in similar spots.

On another note, i would really like ACE matches to be again

I was also thinking that using some sort of ranking to match players might solve some problems. Having ranked the five participating players from each team 1 through 4-5 (from best to worst) and letting them play the corresponding ranks on the other team+ Show Spoiler +

Team A vs Team Brank A1 vs rank B1rank A2 vs rank B2etc.

This way hopefuly most matches will be even. As far as the ranking system used, I'd say that birdie's ranking probably won't do it since far too many players have far too few games to be accurately gauged. So the team captain should annouce his team ranking before each matchday. Obviously this is quite subjective and would also require fairness on the side of every team, but it has to potential to make the league more fun for everybody participating.

Additionaly, it might be worth considering changing the format of the league from pro league bo5 to either:- pro league bo7 with an ace match- simply 5 matches which will always be played without ace

The reasoning being that this would allow more people to play and coupled with a ranked matching (e.g. the one mentioned above), could allow even novice players to play against similar opponents in a tournament environment.

Of course, all of these suggestions have their downsides, so I'll just leave them for discussion's sake.

This idea of ranking works when you play a game like chess, where the playing board is the same across all players. However, despite starcraft being chess applied to video games, there is too much variations for me to safely say that a ranking system will work. For example, how are you going to choose maps? Just have everyone play on FS? That's boring. And how would maps be determined for rankings? You would have to rotate maps every week for each position. Also, what about race matchups? For example, Team A's rank 4 might have the best vP matchup of team A and team B's top 2 players are P. but if Team B's rank 4 is Z, then you are not making the most out of P sniper's abilities, which would be sniping rank 1 and 2. Finally, what is stopping any team captain from fudging ranking system to get the favorable matchups on the maps? Are the rankings going to change every week, and are they internal or controlled by an external system?

It's a noble idea, but I disagree with it

The world is burning and you rather be on this terrible website discussing video games and your shallow feelings

Maybe try to establish a 6 Team Teamleague. But instead of every team plays every team once, do it twice. So the league will go 12 weeks (5+5 weeks regular season, 2 playoff weeks) and you will have more players on each team. Might go for a rule that you cannot use more than 3 people from the first encounter in the second encounter to ensure many players get a chance to play.